TWENTY YEARS AGO, EVE ENSLER’S PLAY THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES
gave birth to V-Day, a global activist movement to end violence against all women and
girls (cisgender, transgender, and those who hold fluid identities that are subject to
gender-based violence).
Since 1998, The Vagina Monologues and other works have been performed across the
world by local V-Day activists, raising over $100 million dollars for grassroots antiviolence
groups, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters, and safe houses
in places like Kenya and Afghanistan. V-Day supports and launched the City of Joy,
a revolutionary center for women survivors of gender violence in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, which has graduated over 1000 women leaders.
Activists look at the intersection of class, race, gender, environmental destruction,
imperialism, militarism, patriarchy, poverty, and war, as women face abuse and
exploitation across layers of systematic and societal oppression, with the most
marginalized and excluded often facing increased levels of violence.
In 2013, V-Day gave birth to One Billion Rising – the largest mass action to
demand an end to violence against women in history. V-Day and One Billion
Rising are a crucial part of the global fight to stop gender-based violence
through attacking the silence — public and private — that allows violence
against women to continue.
With ingenuity and determination, V-Day activists around the world are
tirelessly working to end harassment, rape, battery, incest, female genital
mutilation and sex slavery.